John Michael Crichton (born October 23, 1942, pronounced /ˈkɹaɪtən/ [1]) is an American author, film producer, film director, and television producer. His best-known works are techno-thriller novels, films and television programs. His works are usually based on the action genre and heavily feature technology. Many of his future history novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background.

Biography

Crichton was born in Chicago,[2] Illinois to John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller Crichton, and raised in Roslyn, Long Island, New York.[1] Crichton has two sisters, Kimberly and Catherine, and a younger brother, Douglas, a co-author on the pseudonymously published “Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues.”

He attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts as an undergraduate, graduating summa cum laude in 1964. Crichton was also initiated into the honors organization Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. He graduated at Harvard Medical School, gaining an M.D. in 1969 and did post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, in 1969–1970. In 1988, he was Visiting Writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. A Case of Need, written under the latter pseudonym, won the 1969 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He also co-authored Dealing with his younger brother Douglas under the shared pen name Michael Douglas. The back cover of that book contains a picture of Michael and Douglas at a very young age taken by their mother.

His two pen names were both created to reflect his above-average height. According to his own words, he was about 2.06 m (6 ft 9 in) tall in 1997 [3]. Lange means “tall one” in German, Danish and Dutch, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous seventeenth century dwarf in the court of Queen Henrietta Maria of England.

Crichton has admitted to having once, during his undergraduate study, plagiarized a work by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. According to Crichton the paper was received by his professor with a mark of “B−”. Crichton has claimed that the plagiarism was not intended to defraud the school, but rather as an experiment. Crichton believed that the professor in question had been intentionally giving him abnormally low marks, and so as an experiment Crichton informed another professor of his idea and submitted Orwell’s paper as his own.[3]

Crichton has been married five times and divorced four times. He has been married to Suzanna Childs, Joan Radam (1965-1970), Kathy St. Johns (1978-1980) and Anne-Marie Martin, the mother of his only child, daughter Taylor. Crichton is currently married to Sherri Alexander.